1973-2023. Adriano Romualdi and the blending of Europe and Politics

1973-2023. Adriano Romualdi and the blending of Europe and Politics

A pupil in the historical studies of Renzo De Felice, Giuseppe Tricoli and in the acquisition of a traditionalist worldview by Julius Evola, he was the youngest and most brilliant intellectual of his generation

by Gennaro Malgieri

Source: https://www.barbadillo.it/110706-1973-2023-adriano-romualdi-e-il-connubio-europa-politica/

Can the European 'choice', the re-appropriation of politics, the attempt to create and impose new hegemonies be the elements of the commitment of one who did not fail to adhere to 'objective' values in the time of the transmutation of meaning and the common good? The overall work of Adriano Romualdi, whose young life was cut short on the Via Aurelia, in a terrible car accident, fifty years ago, at only thirty-three years of age, on 12 August 1973, is the affirmative answer to this 'crucial' question. An answer that in view of what is happening in the world, but especially in Europe, seems to us the most pertinent and the most topical.

A pupil in the historical studies of Renzo De Felice, Giuseppe Tricoli and in the acquisition of a traditionalist worldview by Julius Evola, Adriano Romualdi was the youngest and most brilliant intellectual of his generation, an author of specchiate cultural virtues, which he kept behind a no less intense political militancy correlated to the study and commitment of a vast body of literature from which we still draw as if half a century had not passed: a young master, in short. And the cornerstones of his work are those enunciated together with a cult of origins as a reference for a civilisation that was seeing its connotations being lost, and he denounced this with a lucidity that is still attractive today and makes him our contemporary.

The European choice

The European 'choice' for Romuladi, the synthesis of his political and cultural vision, is first and foremost a way of being. It is expressed in the awareness of the decadence of Europe, essentially understood as a melting pot of civilisation, and in the consequent rejection of civilisation produced by the feeling of weariness nurtured by the 'suffering of the world'. The reaction to the 'mythology' of renunciation - typical of all the so-called last times, and therefore also of our own - can only find substance in the revival of the active ideals that have marked the birth and formation of European civilisation, first and foremost the revival of a specific and differentiated will to power not only capable of guaranteeing a 'political order' to the Old Continent, but also - and above all - as a need to restore a balancing role to Europe in the time of ethical relativism and economic-financial colonialism. A vision deduced from the Conservative Revolution that Romualdi 'imported' to Italy through extensive publicity.

Europe, in this context, thus reveals itself to be an idea rather than a mere geographical expression, to be thrown into the fray of 'imperial' contention in which the need for 'European peace' (in the time of the great planetary confrontation and the rising Chinese power) becomes more urgent day by day in the face of the transformation into a battlefield (at the time 'strategic') of the vast area stretching from the Urals to the Atlantic shores. Alongside this prospect of defence, there is also the prospect of regaining a specific European identity distorted by a 'character washing' that began in 1945 and has never ceased, if it is true as it is that Europe has lost its own identity to recognise itself in a soulless Union governed by unrecognisable powers far removed from the spirit of the peoples.

The European 'choice' is not divorced from the re-appropriation of politics. If all the hegemonic ideologies were and are even more today in crisis or have disappeared, this is essentially due to the failure of their application to political management and their inherent weakness. The negativity of Marxist and liberal-democratic models is essentially due to the superimposition of fictitious, intellectualistic schemes on the 'natural' elements present in human communities that have produced the political annulment of subjectivities which, submerged, have not, however, ceased to exist and today, it seems, re-emerge overbearingly on the 'social' scene, causing unquestionable trauma to the apologists of the 'ideological truth'. Regaining possession of politics, therefore, means in essence interpreting, organising and representing the so-called 'new subjectivities' that are then the backbone of community reconstruction as the ultimate instance of the rebuilding of the political order.

It is up to the 'new subjects' to recompose the fragments of the 'social' in the name of political hegemony and for a new politics of values that takes into account the 'objectivity' of the latter: an operation that is certainly not easy after centuries of unbridled nominalism that has led to today's desolating relativism, an immoral heath in which not only has any sacred dimension been destroyed, but all legitimations of power that do not have to do with a 'politics' of particular interests and egoisms have been denied. Who can decide today - and on the basis of what criteria - who is the hostis and who is the amicus? The fundamental categories of the political order have disappeared, or rather, they have been transformed and the value judgement is formulated exclusively on the basis of utilitarian and mercatist considerations even in the absence of an eminently political legitimacy referring to a recognisable and acceptable 'ethocracy', i.e. representative of the civil, historical and cultural values of a people, of a community.

However, in the vertical fall of the old 'hegemonic' ideologies, almost as a pendant, negated ideas resurface. The nation is one of these denied ideas. In the perspective of 'great politics', it is interesting to follow its transformation: today, the nation is no longer the 19th-century type handed down to us by the culture of the Risorgimento, but is identified with a larger, more complex homeland: Europe.

This is how the three moments - European 'choice', re-appropriation of politics, new hegemonies - are closely connected and understood in the work of Romualdi who, although he has not elaborated a specific theory in this regard, has applied himself to them precisely in view of the formulation of what we call 'new culture' and 'great politics'. Two concepts that represent the tracks along which runs a 'projectuality' of civil and/or community rebirth that falls at an extremely contradictory time in terms of both culture and politics, but the two profiles, as is easy to see, are extremely linked.

While on the one hand we are witnessing the revival by the most diverse areas of thought of philosophical and literary themes of a revolutionary-conservative nature, essentially as a symptom of the crisis of the ideologies supporting the 'magnificent destinies and progress of mankind', on the other hand there is a spreading cultural custom tending towards dialogue - in itself very positive - in which, however, there seems to be a lack of pathos of difference, recognition of origins, awareness of belonging, and search for a specific identity. I believe that dialogue and tolerance do not mean abdication or an impossible search for ways of being, social statuses, lifestyles that are completely divorced from a breeding ground. If the plant is not rooted in a more than fertile humus, sooner or later it withers, it dies. About two centuries ago, Donoso Cortés spoke of 'absolute negations and sovereign affirmations', an expression that sounds rebukeful of the regime of mediation that characterises the business of democracies subjected to mercatism, but despite this widespread custom, the reasons for radical decisionism appear more well-founded than ever today. This is, on closer inspection, the most tangible contradiction of our time, which is the time of great decisions in which the suggestions of nostalgia are very poorly matched with the attractions of a possible 'should be'. 

The historical-political reflection

Romualdi's historical and political reflection is certainly a point of reference for those seeking radical answers in the contemporary movement of ideas, characterised by an unhealthy indulgence towards a certain nihilistic rejection to which Romualdi intended to react by rejecting the compromising logic of egalitarianism and massification, the commodification of the soul and mind, the destruction of 'our' Europe, the desecration of Tradition, the desecration of the historical memory of the 'vanquished', the denial of the most intimate reasons for man's life, in the more general aim of adapting 'the values of all time' to the changing reality.

This is the ideal heritage that an entire generation has made its own; that generation born in the early 1950s that considered Romualdi an 'elder brother', orphaned of noble fathers; and for that generation, the day on which a beloved young scholar died marks the date of the beginning of a journey 'outside of tutelage' that would see Romualdi's ideas travel along very different paths with the legs of young intellectuals who, in any case, have not forgotten his 'lesson' with the passing of time. 

The problem of origins

The problem of roots, of origins, connected to the search for a unitary identity of Europeans was Romualdi's great nagging and passion. Thinking broadly and with the strength of a geopolitical conception that went beyond the narrow limits of nationalism, Romualdi attached primary importance to the question of European unity. In his view, it was a matter of making sense of the idea of Europe by rediscovering the reasons and remote elements of its being and projecting them into the present and the future in such a way as to give a sense of a culturally, historically and politically accomplished community.

Not an easy task since Romualdi himself did not hide the fact that for some the European tradition is identified with rationalism, for others with Christianity and for others still with classicism. All these aspects, however one wants to consider them, are limited and particular. Much further back one must go, according to Romualdi, in order to derive from the entire complex of European spiritual history the sense of a tradition. Romualdi points to the Indo-European world as the unifying principle of the peoples of the Old Continent. A world characterised by a spiritual order based on inequality and natural aggregative elements: family, community, state, religion, law. 'To this Indo-European order,' Romualdi observes, 'both the spirit of man and the highest powers collaborate. Human intelligence is not contradicted, but completed, by the presence of an intelligence of nature and the universe. Hence the imperative that drives this human rationality to become action, unifying in its struggle the motives of the human and divine order'.

We are in the presence, as is easy to see, of a sacred conception of existence. A conception that scanned, in the so-called 'traditional times', the course of the year, celebrations, moral and spiritual rules, even the cultivation of fields and the care of homes: a cosmic order in which man lived as a member of an aggregation aware that he had a different destiny from other communities.

The Indo-European order has known auroras and sunsets, fleeting reappearances and persistent oblivion, the absconding of centuries and flashes of light. However, its subtle vein has never entirely died. Even today, in our midst, that metaphysical order lives in the constant possibility of rebirth: we must be able to recognise it' in its changed forms and, if possible, adapt political praxis to the metapolitics of behaviour. 

On fascism

Romualdi's consideration of the European national movements that arose and developed between the two wars also refers back to the scheme of primary values typical of European civilisation and in this sense he addressed the critique of egalitarian and Enlightenment ideologies. In the essay Fascism as a European Phenomenon he writes: 'Fascism was not just an expansionist doctrine. In it was embodied a nostalgia for the origins at a time when tendencies were manifesting themselves that levelled every organic and spiritual structure. That is to say, fascism was the reaction of a modern civilisation that risked perishing precisely because of an excess of modernity'. The end of fascism, however, never constituted a valid reason for Romualdi to bend to the acceptance of the historiography of defeat, nor for him to consider fascism a 'parenthesis' in European history.

Rather, the scholar contemplated the decadence with the militant spirit of rebirth, with the attitude of one who knows that beyond the darkness of the present there are horizons that must be discerned, whatever the cost. The horizon of European rebirth for Romualdi could only be the revival of a myth, of 'great politics' as an expression of a will to power.

This is why the pattern of auroras and sunsets that characterised European history, and of which Romualdi was fully aware, never resulted in his acceptance of nihilism as the ineluctable condition of European man. Nietzscheanly faithful to the cyclical vision of history, Romualdi always believed in historical events regenerating the consciousness and life of peoples. The very consideration of the advent of fascist movements is the clearest symptom of the application of a 'Nietzschean method' to the analysis of major events. And so too, derived from Nietzsche, in Romualdi is the conception of a 'great politics' to which the Italian right frequently referred in the early 1970s. It is evident from Romualdi's writings - and in particular from those we reproduce below - that his cultural and civic militancy was entirely projected into the practical implementation of an ideal and existential project: the formulation not of a theory, a doctrine, an ideology, but of a vision of the world and life.

The 'Leitbilder', the guiding images that Romualdi pursued in his intellectual itinerary were all part of a Weltanschauung to be launched not only as a challenge to our time, but also as an 'active' and concrete proposal for spiritual rebirth. The worldview is the ultimate and necessary watershed in the face of the babel, linguistic and conceptual, that dominates our age. This is not to avoid understanding the lacerations existing in other affiliations, to open up to the world, to play cultural and political games on the same tables. Rather, reaffirming the validity and persistence of the worldview as the discriminator of different identities is a way of recognising oneself, of knowing where one wants to go and with whom to build. Worldview can and must be synonymous with aggregation. On the contrary, everything will be more difficult; the nihilistic perspective is before our eyes.

The 'new culture'

What are the 'new culture' and the 'great politics' if not the implementation of a world vision that contains within itself - albeit in the mutability of operational conditions - the keys to a cultural and civil design? To what is the toil of specifying new essences of politics reduced if the ultimate scenario in which to bring them to life is missing? The demon of intellectualism that has contaminated the West for some three centuries seems to have taken root even where no one would have imagined: it is a victory of bourgeois civilisation, springing from Enlightenment rationalism, which has substituted the dictatorship of the philosophes for spiritual tension with all that this word means. "Once thought was God, then it became man, now it has become plebs". wrote Nietzsche.

Nietzsche's metaphor effectively renders today's climate and context. A world of absences is all around us. But it is difficult, impossible, to get used to living with nothingness. Especially for those who, as Adriano Romualdi believes, do not cease to believe in the perenniality of the values of European civilisation.

Romualdi's work, albeit unfinished, is all steeped in the aforementioned themes. Two short writings that have been repeated several times are so: La Destra e la crisi del nazionalismo and Idee per una cultura di destra. Both essays clarify - to a certain extent - what can and should be the supporting elements of a 'new culture' and 'great politics'. They must be read in perspective, of course. And above all, taking into account that the Italian Right, in its most cultured and dynamic components, has abandoned the nostalgic-ritualistic baggage, the empty and visceral (as well as sterile and alibisitic) anti-communism, the questionable victim mentality, seriously rediscovering its roots, overcoming the temptations of closure and distrust, opening up to a new conception of Europe, the blocs and the Third World.

Romualdi saw before others what was to come. And what we observe is what he led us to believe. For all this he is alive and it would be good not to forget him.